SANAM - Sametou Sawtan

Between the Middle East and North Africa. The Lebanese music scene is in full artistic ferment, duly fueled by the protests that followed the political and governmental turmoil of 2020-2022, and further shaken by the explosion in the port area of Beirut.

While praise still echoes for Yasmine Hadid's album, and following Claudia Khachan's latest project ("The Vapornet"), another powerful voice rises over the skies of Beirut: that of Sandy Chamoun, a singer who, together with Sanam and the production of Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart), wins the favor of Constellation with their first album recorded in studio rather than born out of spontaneous live performances.

Credit nonetheless goes to Hans Joachim Irmler of Faust for having put the band together in 2021 as a one night stand project, now the mouthpiece of an abrasive, seductive music, the product of a perfect expressive cohesion among the band's members: the aforementioned Sandy Chamoun (vocals), Antonio Hajj (bass), Farah Kaddour (buzuq), Anthony Sahyoun (synth), Marwan Tohme (guitar) and Pascal Semerdjian (drums and percussion).

Recorded in Paris, written in Beirut, "Sametou Sawtan" doesn't sacrifice the band's more experimental soul. The recording studio becomes a place to cultivate the seeds of a wild, smoky sound. It matters little that some of the sonorities of the title track or the ecstatic "Sayl Damei" are fed by a westernized psychedelia: the Lebanese band brings together poetry and sounds from past and present with an unstoppable expressive urgency full of magic.

Sanam's compositions evolve across post-rock and free-jazz structures and the rhythmic and harmonic patterns typical of Arabic music, in a succession of geometries that the sextet dresses in shifting sonorities, now obsessive and slightly atonal ("Harik"), now minimal and wild ("Hadikat Al Ams"), free from clichés and artistic dogma, to the point of exploring new frontiers where psychedelia and Arabic tradition are filtered through the virtuosic use of autotune.

Their cultural roots are evident in the lyrics, which adapt writings by pan-Arab authors as well as popular Egyptian songs, such as the splendid “Hamam”, which Sanam shape with grace before letting it implode into a post-rock-noise scratch. “Sametou Sawtan” is a powerful cultural and poetic embrace: for the six protagonists, music cannot be detached from its political and social context, and every gesture of theirs is also an act of commitment, a unity of intent that extends to other aspects of life, such as food.

There isn't a single track that isn't the fruit of deep reflection and creative participation, because here it's not the contribution of individual elements that matters, but the collective result. There's no leadership or spotlight-seeking, just a convergence of intent that, moving between moments of near-gothic solemnity (“Goblin”), unusual fusions of jazz, surf and dub (“Sayl Damei”) and passages of pure spiritual ascesis (the title track), gives life to one of the most original proposals of recent times.

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07/10/2025